


i've been dead for thirty-five years (today is the day i live)

by broblerone



Series: post-cal bro drabbles [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: All hurt no comfort, Blood, Child Abuse, Excessive Death Imagery, Experimentation with Malapropisms, Gen, Implied Indirect Sexual Abuse, Manipulation, Mind Control, Whump, aftermath of abuse, post-cal bro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-18 23:26:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16128893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/broblerone/pseuds/broblerone
Summary: bro can't handle being separated from cal.





	i've been dead for thirty-five years (today is the day i live)

**Author's Note:**

> this one probably doesn't make much sense but i wanted to experiment a little bit so like, deal, i guess. also, first person to name what the title is a reference to gets my eternal devotion.

You’re crawling back to him again.

It’s been nearly eleven weeks since you lost him, but whenever you close your eyes, all you see is the searing blue reflecting into yourself. You’re as close to certain as your buzzing-numb head can manage that your pupils weren’t always capsized with his color. Your memories are too foggy to see your baby-fat cheeks in the mirror, but you can’t shake the idea that your baby golds were violated at some point along the way. Molten honey, defiled by a ring of possessive blue. How else to define yourself?

You curl around the towel. Your shirt lies discarded on the floor beside the futon. You can’t stop sweating.

The rattle of sword against sword draws to your mind his coiled tail, his dripping fangs. Your blood congeals under his venom. If your blood moves freely through your veins, then how can you explain your stagnation? How can you explain your hardened endoskeleton, posturing you? Steeling you? The pins and nettles of blood rushing past crumbling clots is excruciating. You’re not used to being made of liquid. Your body still fights the urge to decompose.

The sea would accept your salt-shined body as is. You’ve never cried before. You’re not about to start. Your joints are white with tension, but you can’t let go. To be empty-handed is to be naked, and to be naked is to be weak. To be naked is to be seen. To be naked is to be desired by the hungry, to be feasted upon by outsiders, by those who want to do to you what he did to your eyes. Even in his death, you can’t escape the hold.

You hold on.

Sweating it out isn’t working. No matter how much of your insides pool out, his sick bile still sinks heavy in your lungs. To breathe in too quickly is to be met with a dry retch. When you cough, you don’t cough up the deep black tainting you. You just want him _out_ of you. What leech could exalt him from you? You, who spent too many nights choking, asphyxiated. Your resolve for brutality, your tolerance to the burn of a child’s plea.

The way his voice would break around the word “stop” makes your stomach churn. You welcome it. If you vomit, maybe you’ll expel him. It too closely mimics the way your own brittle voice would snap under his pressure along with your will. He would instruct you to beat the shit out of him, and you would. It didn’t matter how much he cried. It didn’t matter how much he begged. When he stopped complaining about it, you were told that he had matured. Funny, how _you_ had never gotten to mature. He would skulk around the apartment, dreading your arrival.

You never had to teach him how to dress his wounds. You didn’t have the nerve to try.

Damp cloth in a heap against your palpitating chest. Your jaw hurts from clenching it so tightly for so long. You’re certain, as certain as your hive-mind allows, that you’re bleeding out onto this futon. The iron is cold, like metal is supposed to be, exhausted from the pores under your scars and leaving you to wilt against this stupid fucking towel. Your body shrivels to a prune, your skin would dissolve to ash at the drop of a pin. The world around you can seep up what’s left of your exsanguinated self, and you can decay in peace.

Your body won’t let you. Your body still fights the urge to decompose. You beg to be gilded with what you deserve. God doesn’t answer.

You swallow a mouthful of sand and disintegrate into the cushions. You are a carcass, eleven weeks into its own wingspan, and you still don’t have the decency to rot. You have always been a selfish, petulant child. Even when reprimanded, you couldn’t give up your self-righteous guilt when it came to teaching someone more important than you how to be strong. Your narcissism demands that you be held accountable.

You can hear him berating you for assuming you could ever be trusted to make a choice of your own. Your leech to exalt him pales. You’ve grown bloated from sucking him dry. The only option left is the acceptance of nature running its course.

The cruel wait thrust onto your trembling shoulders. The cold gaze of mercy. She was wholly unapproachable, shunning you, then refusing to teach you because you lacked experience. You were unworthy, you were unworldly. Malapropism is your only solace. The towel is dark blue, like his shirt.

You looked at your own child, and you destroyed him. The proof coils around your pupil in a shade of blue best described as the color of avulsion.

But still, knees weakened, you’re crawling back to his image. For all the wounds he inflicted, he would cup your cheeks in his hands and tell you your scars made you beautiful. For every person he demanded you recoil from, he would wrap his arms around you tighter, a promise that nobody could love you like him. For every nightmare he induced in your fragile unconscious, he would lull you back into drowsy security.

This is the first time he hasn’t been here to do it. He had wrecked you, desecrated you; to want him is insanity.

But you’ve never had to deal with a nightmare all by yourself before.

**Author's Note:**

> i might do a second chapter for this one that touches more on the second half of the title/adds some much needed comfort to this hurt, but. not tonight, lmao.


End file.
